Homeopathy, vaccination, autism: Together again

As you can see above, this here blog caught the attention of the Irish Times yesterday, with founder skeptic Paul O’Donoghue using it as the hook for his latest column in the science section. [Greetings, Irish Times readers! By the way, here’s some stuff just for you. And here’s some more.] O’Donoghue was referring to my recent post on homoeopathy which looked at the claims made in the latest awareness campaign by the Irish Society of Homeopaths. For what it’s worth, you can read my entire archive of homeopathy-related posts by clicking here.

But the main point of yesterday’s Irish Times article was to draw attention to a particularly disturbing manifestation of homeopathy’s by now almost endearing dilutions-of-grandeur problem; namely, CEASE therapy, an approach that claims to use homeopathy to create “a very effective way to treat autism with amazing results“.

One corollary of the CEASE approach is the oft-cited and oft-refuted claim that MMR vaccinations cause autism. Now this issue is just so darned convoluted, it is difficult to deal with adequately in a short blog post. Further, it has been dealt with extensively just about everywhere else (summary: there is a vast amount of research evidence showing that MMR vaccination does not cause autism in any way, shape, or form).

But I think some points are worth recording because they are overlooked with surprising frequency whenever this debate comes up. Here are four in particular that I feel should be given more prominence:

We must always remember that western science is merely an arbitrary discourse shared by a hegemonic narrative community. Mind you, Skype seems to work okay

Secondly, Wakefield wasn’t opposed to vaccinating children against mumps, measles, and rubella. Now, please TAKE THAT IN, homeopaths. He wasn’t against it. He was just against doing it all in the one injection (i.e., the so-called “three-in-one” MMR approach). With the benefit of hindsight, this isn’t altogether surprising. After all, prior to publishing his (fraudulent) anti-MMR Lancet paper, he had filed to patent his own vaccine, which if produced would have been a lucrative commercial competitor to the standard MMR product.

As exhibited in the UK's national Science Museum. I kid you not

Thirdly, many people believe that concerns about vaccination relate mostly to these conspiracies around MMR and autism. However that’s not the case. Claims that (a) vaccines make you sick, (b) they contain toxic ingredients, (c) the immunity they offer is either temporary or non-existent, (d) they are only promulgated because of the large profits to be made by capitalist drug companies, and (e) the government colludes in this profiteering in a way that reveals it to be totalitarian, are actually not new claims. In fact, precisely the same claims were being made by anti-vaccinationists back in the 19th century, almost as soon as vaccination programmes were first launched (and far before autism was ever heard of). In other words, this whole thing didn’t just kick off with Wakefield in the ’90s. The anti-vaccinationist movement is a permanent protest; it’s just its superficial details — such as which specific vaccine is targeted — that change over time.

All hail the vaccination monster!

And finally, it is interesting to note how anti-vaccination movements differ across cultures. For example, as Ben Goldacre records in Bad Science, during the 1990s France was gripped by a scare that hepatitis B vaccine causes multiple sclerosis, while in rural Nigeria protesters claim that anti-polio vaccines cause infertility. Note that in other societies, such adverse outcomes of hep-B or polio vaccines have never been noticed. And note also that, apart from a small number of mostly English-speaking countries, people have never picked up on a link between MMR and autism. Put simply, all this suggests that anti-vaccination scares originate from culture-bound discourses, rather than from actual patterns of illness or disability (which, presumably, don’t stop at the border).

As I said earlier, these are just a few specific debating points that I think are helpful when considering the wider issue in terms of its research evidence. After all, the wider issue has been covered in extensive detail elsewhere. Brian Deer, the investigative journalist I mentioned, has assembled an enormous online archive of relevant materials. And the Wikipedia entry, while there for the taking of course, is also worth a look.

As for the homeopaths, well of course their particular shtick is dilutions, so they always have lots to say about putting tiny amounts of something inside your body. Except, in the case of vaccinations produced by pharmaceutical companies and evidence-tracked by scientific medicine, they think it’s wrong. Totally wrong. Don’t you know it causes autism?

4 replies

Homeopathy is a non-toxic system of western medical science originated in Germany by Dr. Friedrich Samuel Hahnemann (10 April 1755 Germany- 2 July 1843 France). He received his M.D. with honors in conventional medicine from University of Erlangen, Germany on 10 Aug 1779.

From Germany (1796) homeopathy spreads to austria (1816) and then to the rest of the europe. The birth date of the founder and father of Homeopathy i.e. 10 April every year is celebrated as ‘ World Homeopathy Day ‘ and the week following his birthday i.e. 10-16 April every year is celebrated as ‘ World Homeopathy Awareness Week ‘ all through the world